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PHD-DESIGN  May 2010

PHD-DESIGN May 2010

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Subject:

Re: Origins of social constructivism and social constructionism

From:

David Sless <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

David Sless <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Sun, 30 May 2010 12:59:30 +1000

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Hi all, 

It might be useful to distinguish between constructivism and constructionism. I'm not sure if they have the same meanings in all contexts of use. In communication research, Barnett Pearce offers the following:
> Although it is an oversimplification, it is useful to say that constructivists see communication as a cognitive process of knowing the world and social constructionists see it as a social process of creating the world. constructivists foreground perception while social constructionists foreground action. (author italics, Pearce 1996, p 98) 

This is the distinction I tend to follow in relating this work to information design.

As to the intellectual origins of these ideas, I suspect that social constructionism, realism, empiricism, and idealism—to mention just the main types of epistemologies—are ever present in our discourses. But, describing them, articulating and arguing about their differences is another matter. 

David

blog: www.communication.org.au/dsblog
web: http://www.communication.org.au

Professor David Sless BA MSc FRSA
CEO • Communication Research Institute •
• helping people communicate with people •

Mobile: +61 (0)412 356 795
Phone: +61 (0)3 9489 8640
Skype: davidsless

60 Park Street • Fitzroy North • Melbourne • Australia • 3068

On 30/05/2010, at 9:01 AM, Ken Friedman wrote:

> Dear All,
> 
> Terry is seeking Abu Nasr al-Farabi, an Arabic philosopher who lived ca. 870 to 950. Al-Farabi created both a sociology and a social psychology that were quite advanced and subtle. He also worked in logic, medicine, and mathematics. Ibn Arabi lived from 1165 to 1240, worked in the Islamic sciences of law, theology, and mysticism, as well as philosophy.
> 
> Westman is both right and wrong to see the I Ching as a constructivist or constructionist work. As an oracular book that gives no explicit instructions, the I Ching is implicitly constructivist. We must draw our understanding from it. If by constructionist or constructivist, we mean a work that explicitly describes constructionist or constructivist principles in the manner of Berger and Luckmann or Searle, then the I Ching is not such a work. The I Ching can't be said to serve as the origin of constructionism or constructivism in the sense that Terry seeks.
> 
> But I'd argue that neither can al-Farabi or ibn Arabi -- they lived in a different time, their objects of inquiry and their style of argument were far to different to our own. 
> 
> One of the great opportunities of our time is the opportunity to see how great traditions of thought that might have influenced each other directly but did not can serve us in a larger way. There is great likelihood that different philosophical and scientific traditions did influence each other, but this more often took place through "technology transfer" of such innovations as the cipher or double-entry book-keeping than through the wide sharing of complete books or systems of information and knowledge. An idea -- or, more often, the rumor of an idea or an idea about an idea -- probably traveled farther than the deeper information that would today count as an original contribution. What we have instead is more likely parallel and often differing concepts that might have developed farther and faster in an age where people spoke across cultures and distances as we do today.  
> 
> Once in a while, we really do see books that can be said to be an early version of our modern disciplines. In 700 BC, for example, the Chinese scholar Guan Zhong wrote the Guan Zi, one of the first great treatises on economics as we understand the term today. The book also discusses administration, markets, and how to organize societies, serving as one of the great early examples of organization theory. Despite the historical importance of this book, however, it exerted little or no influence on the fields of economics and organization theory in the West. While I don't know how or whether Guan Zhong influenced Eastern scholarship, this book was to the West rather like Leonardo's scientific notebooks: works of individual genius and insight that might have made a difference to subsequent scholarship had we known them at a time when they might have influenced the evolution of a field. In China, emperors bent on establishing their priority and unique control conducted the periodical purging of libraries and information systems to erase the past. For this reason, many of the greatest Chinese ideas and inventions of past centuries remained unknown even to many Chinese.
> 
> For these reasons and others like them, I'd argue that neither Lao Tse nor the authors of the I Ching nor the work of al-Farabi or ibn Arabi can be described as the origin of constructionism or constructivism. Despite this, all are sources of valuable ideas on which we can draw today in shaping our own understandings of philosophy and science, as well as design.
> 
> Yours,
> 
> Ken
> 
> Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS
> Professor
> Dean
> 
> Swinburne Design
> Swinburne University of Technology
> Melbourne, Australia
> 
> Phone Dean's Office +61 3 9214 6078
> Phone Faculty Switchboard +61 3 9214 6755 
> 
> URL: www.swinburne.edu.au/design

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